At a meeting in Mayfair today, Sheikh Bandar bin Mohammed bin Saoud Al-Thani, chairman of the Qatar Investment Authority, made an announcement that shook the oil world. Together with BP CEO William Lin, they announced, to a small crowd meeting at Claridge's [a hotel owned by the Qatar Investment Authority] that the Qatar Investment Fund was acquiring BP's embattled stake in Rosneft, the Russian oil major, for $4 billion.

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BP, having pledged to divest its massive Rosneft stake--previously one of its more valuable assets--in early 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has spent the past two years searching for a way out of the quagmire that sanctions and political pressure has placed them in. Attempts to abandon the stake were complicated by legal disputes, and the only potential buyers were thought to be Russian state entities who simultaneously were not inclined to pay and were also not incentivized to undervalue Moscow's greatest golden goose.

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Reportedly, late last year, Qatar's investment fund, controlling hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, became interested in acquiring the orphaned stake in Rosneft. Qatar had previously bailed out the disastrous Rosneft IPO a few years back; and currently holds a 18.46% stake in Rosneft, which it has maintained through the war and the sanctions-related difficulty Rosneft has had in the past several years. While price was a sticking point for the negotiations, the real difficulty was reportedly found in Whitehall, which, while seeing the Qataris as a potential solution to one of their more complex problems, were also loathe to extend any sort of lifeline to the Russian state. A recent Qatari order from Belfast shipyards, we can only presume, had nothing to do with finally obtaining their permission.

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Combined, Qatar will now hold a 38.22% stake in Rosneft, becoming the only major shareholder other than the Russian government, though not holding a controlling interest in the company by any means. The bet is seen as a risky "double or nothing" move by Qatar, which likely considered selling its own Rosneft stake given the difficulties it posed, giving it a nominally large chunk in what could be one of the world's largest oil concerns, but presently, is very much not. Only time will tell if this move was one of strategic brilliance or one of the Gulf's biggest blunders in years.